Graphics to drive TSMC's FinFET process

LONDON – Processor IP licensor Imagination has announced it will work with foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. to develop reference design flows using PowerVR Series 6 GPUs for manufacturing processes including the forthcoming 16-nm FinFET process.

GPU cores are coming to dominate the area, power and performance of SoCs and therefore process design flows and libraries need to be tuned and optimized for them.

The use of high bandwidth memory channels and 3-D IC assembly will be part of the collaboration and should allow the two companies to demonstrate high performance, small physical footprint and low power, said Imagination Technologies Group plc (Kings Langley, England).

"Just as memory drove silicon processes in the 80s and 90s, and CPUs drove processes further in the late 90s and 00s, high performance mobile GPUs for graphics and compute applications are one of the major drivers for our most advanced process technologies," said Cliff Hou, vice president of R&D at TSMC (Hsinchu, Taiwan), in a statement issued by Imagination.

Hossein Yassaie, CEO of Imagination, said: "Through advanced projects initiated under this partnership, Imagination and TSMC are working together to showcase how SoCs will transform the future of mobile and embedded products."

As well as developing the widely licensed PowerVR series of graphics processors, Imagination also offers the PowerVR VPU video decoder and encoder, the Ensigma radio processor unit (RPU) which covers connectivity applications and the recently acquired line of MIPS processor cores